SUICIDE EPIDEMIC SPREADS THROUGH RANKS OF POLICE

The cover-up of how Catherine Galvin died began almost as quickly as her
life ended.

Fellow officers found the 28-year-old state trooper just after midnight on
Oct. 29, 1994. She was seated in her bed in her South Boston apartment,
propped up by the headboard. Straight ahead, on top of a dresser, a
television broadcast a late-night show.

Soon there was a swirl of police activity around Galvin's lifeless body as
dozens of uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives studied the
situation. Outside, curious neighbors and reporters gathered.

"The victim had an accidental discharge while cleaning her firearm," a
Boston police spokesman told the media several hours after her death.
Later, the spokesman said foul play and suicide had been ruled out. The
department's official report concluded: "Victim accidentally shot self
while cleaning weapon."

But Catherine Galvin didn't die accidentally.

A week later, after the glare of the media spotlight had faded, the truth
came out in the medical examiner's report: She had deliberately killed
herself, firing a single bullet from a .40-caliber handgun into her head.

It was obvious the night of her death what happened to Galvin, two officers
at the scene told the Globe. But as she lay fatally wounded, police decided
to tell the public that what happened this October night was a tragic
accident.

The Galvin case was not an isolated one. Every year, hundreds of police
officers across the country commit suicide. They do so at an alarming rate,
a rate that is much higher than that of the rest of the population -- and
rising. One expert calls it "an epidemic."

The contributing factors are varied: stress, alcohol abuse, the depressing
grimness of police work, the frustration of office politics. And unlike
other high-stress jobs -- in medicine and aviation, for instance -- police
carry weapons that they can turn against themselves.

As in the Galvin case, dozens of those suicides are purposely misclassified
as accidents. Sometimes it's to ease the pain felt by survivors and ensure
they get better death benefits. Often, it's to protect the reputation of
the dead officer and the department from what many police officers believe
is a shameful act.

Police officers are twice as likely to kill themselves as to be killed by a
criminal, according to the National Association of Police Chiefs in Miami.
In Buffalo, one of the few in-depth studies of police deaths found that
officers in that city were eight times as likely to kill themselves as they
were to be slain in the line of duty. Buffalo officers were also three
times more likely to kill themselves than other city workers, the study
found.

The Boston Police Department has one of the highest suicide rates in the
country -- only slightly behind Atlanta, and more than double that of the
New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago departments, according to a 1994
study of seven urban police forces by the New York City Council.

At least a dozen Boston officers killed themselves in the past 10 years, a
rate six times that of the rest of the working-age population in
Massachusetts. An analysis of computerized records of deaths in
Massachusetts from 1989 to 1995 found at least 50 law enforcement deaths
classified as suicides.

The number of actual suicides is believed to be substantially higher
because many are misclassified as accidents. In Buffalo, for instance, one
in five police deaths were suicides wrongly classified as accidents.

Yet, despite the numbers -- and the occasional media attention when a
police department experiences a rash of suicides, as New York City did in
1994 -- the death of officers by their own hand remains one of law
enforcement's most fiercely guarded secrets.

Checked-by: Joel W. Johnson